


jeankob drabbles

by melforbes



Category: Sex Education (TV)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2019-10-13 12:59:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 10,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17488481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melforbes/pseuds/melforbes
Summary: cross-posted prompts from tumblr, mostly rough and unedited and for fun





	1. twisted ankle

_[regardstosoulandromance](http://regardstosoulandromance.tumblr.com/) asked:_

_“I think I twisted my ankle…” Jean x Jakob_

“are you sure?” he asks, reaching out toward her leg. “let me look.”

he stretches out on the couch, untangling himself from her, looking down at her little feet. everything about her is so small, so strangely small; when she puts on his shirts in the morning, the clothes dwarf her, and his work-boots alongside her little wedges almost look comical, as if made for a giant. when he first used her bath-towels, he felt so exposed, barely able to cover what needed to be covered, unable to set foot beyond her bedroom without embarrassment. her kitchen counters are lower than his, her forks and knives smaller. multiple times, he’s held her hand in hope of gauging a ring size, but everything he’s looked at so far has seemed to big. 

but he likes that he can take her foot into his hands, run his thumb along the bones of her little ankle. if he makes a circle with his thumb and pointer finger, that loop can just barely fit around her whole ankle. when he says goodbye to her, he can pull her into his arms and tuck her in. he’s started going to the gym again just because he wants to be able to literally sweep her off her feet on her birthday, lifting her into the most grandiose of kisses, making her laugh at just how perfect a moment can be. he likes that she tends to stand on tiptoe when they’re together.

“just a little sprain,” she says nonchalantly, taking off her glasses and closing her eyes. “nothing significant. no swelling.”

for the third time this week, they had dinner and a movie at her place. he made dinner; she picked the movie. this time, they paired panang curry with almost famous. though he could ask whether or not he’s staying over, he already knows the answer. 

“i just don’t want to aggravate it,” she says, lounging comfortably, covered in a blanket and dressed in comfortable clothes. though he loves the strange, frilly way she dresses, he loves even more seeing her like this: ruffled, cozy, uncovered. “the stairs would be a bit much.”

oh, of course, the stairs. so this must be tonight’s excuse.

“it should be fine by morning,” she excuses, and before she can further her argument, he’s already standing up, crouching down so that he can slide his arms underneath her body, picking her up bridal style. one hand holds her glasses while the other grips at his shirt. she looks up at him with a sleepy little smile, says, “my hero.”

he’s staying over. if she plays her cards right, maybe he’ll carry her back down the stairs in the morning.


	2. baking cupcakes

_[enigmaticdr](https://enigmaticdr.tumblr.com/) asked:_

_7 + 20 + 34 jeankob :))))))))))))))))))_

_7: when you’re happy, i’m happy_

_20: you’re too damn cute_

_34: you’ve got something on your cheek_

even the spatulas have penises on them. he’s starting to think he’ll never escape them. just when he thinks he’s seen them all, another one pops up in the woodwork, blending in with the wallpaper, perhaps even being part of the wallpaper. when left alone in the house, he finds himself looking over all of the books, the strange almanacs about things he thought he already knew. she’s put him in different positions, asked him to try different things, and though he’s certainly not inexperienced, he feels strangely amateur. but, of course, he copes, for his palms fit nicely around her hips, and he doesn’t have to put himself into an awkward position in order to make her rip the fitted sheet off of the mattress.  _again,_  he adds, doting on his own ego. 

“so, melted?” jean holds up the sticks of butter with a grimace. “i’m really not much of a baker.”

or a cook, it appears. he’s fairly sure she’s used her kitchen twice. it felt like a newfound love language to memorize her order at four different takeout restaurants.

“soft,” he says as he sifts flour into one of her bowls, one shockingly /not/ covered in penises.

it’s only cupcakes, a treat for his younger daughter’s birthday. jean has two clients in the afternoon, and he doesn’t work this day each week, so they’re taking the morning to bake birthday cupcakes, chocolate with vanilla frosting. jean’s cocoa powder is french, from a french shop in the country of france, completely high-end and completely unopened. wafting the scent towards himself, he almost feels weak at the knees.

“not in the microwave?” she asks.

“put in the bowl,” he says, “then leave the bowl on top of the oven. soft. not melting.”

for once, she’s not struggling, poking, or breaking for attention; instead, it’s unbelievably clear that she can’t bake. he even gave her the easy job, just putting the makings of frosting into a mixer. 

“isn’t a teaspoon of vanilla just a bit much?” she asks, grimacing as she looks to him. 

he adds almond extract to the cake batter and says, “if the recipe says yes, you say yes.”

“right.” she nods to herself, seeming as if she’s giving a mental pep-talk.  _i can make this frosting. i can make this frosting. i can make this frosting_. “alright. yeah, makes sense.”

by the time he’s pouring batter into the cupcake tin, she’s just barely turned on the mixer. he scrapes his mixing bowl just enough to make the cupcakes even, then slides the tray into the oven.

“with my girls, we have a… _tradition_ ,” he says, holding the spatula in one hand and the mixing bowl in the crook of his arm as he walks toward her.

she perks up with questioning eyes, like a little canary in a nightdress, unbrushed hair and a near-vulgar nightie. he likes when she wears something so sheer that he can see the contours of her body through it, hipbones peeking out or breasts outlined in the most natural way. he likes seeing every part of her, even the parts that can’t cook. he likes that she started recording master chef just for him.

“leave some batter behind,” he says, then takes a lick of chocolate cake mix off of the spatula, “eat while baking.”

he knows she’s not the type to lament about raw egg, so he holds the spatula out to her, watches as her tentative look changes to a lean-in. she brings her tongue to the spatula, close enough to where his mouth was only seconds ago, cleaning the rubber off with a single lick. she closes her eyes and hums at the flavor, asks, “the french cocoa?”

nodding, he says, “very good?”

“divine,” she says, then leans in for another lick. “you’ll have to make these again.” 

yes, she loves when he bakes. cinnamon rolls on sundays, popped in the oven before waking her up with a cuddle. he hates having to tear himself away from her in bed, but he loves the way she looks licking cinnamon frosting off of her fingers.

and she has a little bit of batter on her cheek, so he reaches out, rubs the chocolate mark away, licks the batter off of his thumb. somehow, she looks startled, surprised, but the shock is only momentary. she reaches out, takes the spatula from him, and with the deftness and determination of a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing and why she’s doing it, she smears the batter around her mouth, on her cheeks, at the one particularly sensitive spot on her neck. her eyes offer him a challenge, but a perky challenge. 

the least he can do is lick it off.


	3. crying

anonymous asked:

For your fic prompt. Jean and Jakob: Your eyes are red. Were you crying?

_full disclosure: i sent more or less this to the sweet[@enigmaticdr](https://tmblr.co/m7_AciLqLpAEbBG2PRT_bDQ) so this is basically just me recycling material. also we’re just going to pretend that jakob can drive because i don’t feel like adding any kind of effort to that plot aspect asd;lfkjasdlfkj lmao_

when he went upstairs to tell her that dinner was ready, he found the bathroom door in her bedroom closed but not locked. that was her signal, a silent one, one that didn’t take much effort: if he wanted to come in, he could, but she currently felt as if she needed to be alone. she was too much a psychologist to truly isolate herself but too human not to crave a silent, blocked-off refuge. her vulnerability was strange in that way, almost hidden at times, and as he hovered a hand over the bathroom door, hesitating to knock, he felt himself wince. 

the signing had lasted four hours in total, only intended to be three but long lines and high demand causing it to run over. of course, remi insisted on staying even when jean looked more than ready to leave. for the spare hour, jakob had waited in the cookbooks section of the bookstore, looking over the new volume from chrissy teigan - his favorite - and trying to find ideas for jean’s birthday dinner, the one she told him not to make a fuss about. still, he couldn’t look too deeply into any of the books, not when he could still peer through the racks and see remi and jean sitting together and signing, remi looking smug and pleased while jean looked uncomfortable. by the time the signing finally wrapped up, jakob was nearly through with fabricating a family emergency so that he and jean could leave early. 

for the whole hour-long drive home, jean had been silent, the kind of silent that told him not to ask. though he knew her ex-husband was still a thorn in her side, he didn’t know much beyond the basics: remi had cheated multiple times over a number of years, had been remarkably unwilling to parent, and was somehow convinced that the split had been amicable. jean, of course, tended to put on a kinder face while interacting with him, letting little things go unnoticed, not picking fights jakob knew she would pick otherwise. though he wanted to ask how she felt, he knew such questions would be too much right now, so he took a deep breath and drove.

now, he forced himself to knock, two light taps just to indicate he was here. on the other side of the door, she took in a sharp breath, a crying breath, so he pushed open the door before she could respond, unable to hold himself back, unable to let her cry alone. she sat back against the bathtub, knees pulled close to her body, her long skirt dwarfing her frame. her eyes were red, her glasses left on top of the sink; the way she kept both tissues and a bin close to herself on the floor made him think that she’d had a lot of practice for this ritual. 

when she looked up at him, her lip quivered, her eyes closing to stop the horrible burning sensation of crying, her face going back to her hands in seconds. though he tried to be gentle as he sat alongside her, he needed her in his arms, so he pulled her there, felt how she came to him so easily. she fit against him so well, her small body fitting so perfectly into his arms, and as she hid her face against his shoulder, he rubbed at her back, spoke softly to her. it always calmed her down when he spoke swedish to her softly, all words she didn’t understand, all things he wanted to say but was afraid to just yet. he could tell her he loved her in this language and mean it, but she would never know. he could tell her that he was sorry, that her ex-husband was one of the most pitiful people he had ever met, that she was so much more than the lesser half of a defunct pair. he could tell her that she was brilliant, that she was strong, that he can’t stop thinking of how she’d peppered flour onto his nose last weekend while baking sticky buns. she was of absolutely no help in the kitchen and tended to be the most tantalizing of distractions at any point, so she would sit on the counters, tune the radio to find what she thought would be perfect cooking music, ask if she could help even though he was fairly sure she could burn water. and with the little tap of flour to his nose, he was done, laughing as he so easily hoisted her over his shoulder, said  _you are a distraction_  as if that were the greatest of compliments. he set her down on the porch, told her to wait until the sticky buns were in the oven, and the whole time, she’d pouted against the glass doors, puppy-dog eyes begging him to come join her. in the end, the buns came out burnt because they wanted to take their time together on the porch, but they were both more than content to scrape off the burnt bits.

he wasn’t accustomed to others wanting him around, not anymore. usually, he was on the sidelines of life, fixing sinks while the family of the house pretended he wasn’t there. when it came to his daughters, he knew that they loved him but wanted him to be a scarce presence. though he didn’t feel the need to take up space in the lives of others, it was undeniably isolating to always be cast off, to tend to be a spare presence, and with jean, he felt central, so central. on nights they spent apart, she would call him at nine in the evening just to say goodnight, but nine would turn to ten, and ten would turn to eleven, and he’d have to remind her several times of her early-morning clients just to ease her into hanging up. when he stayed over, he had her full attention even when they were relaxing together. sometimes, they would lounge on the couch together, each reading a different book, and even while her attention was caught up in something entirely beyond him, she would still be touching him, leaning against him, reaching out to wrap his arm around her. she invited him and his family on weekend getaways, kept his favorite kind of coffee in a mason jar on her shelves, bought a tube of his toothpaste just to keep in her bathroom. though she was emotionally guarded, she was unguarded when it came to her actions; there was no way to deny that she wanted him in her life. he hadn’t felt such a thing in a long time. 

as she eased, he kissed her forehead, kept her close. 

“i came up to say dinner is ready,” he gave, making her laugh a little against him. he found his toes curling at the sound.

“in bed?” she asked sheepishly but seriously, knowing it wasn’t their usual choice but knowing she needed it nonetheless.

he’d made homemade ravioli. he knew that there was a sleeve of oreos in the cupboard.

“okay,” he said. “in bed.”

but when he tried to untangle himself from her, when he tried to head back downstairs to serve, she pulled him closer and made him stay put. 


	4. tateuring

His bed is bigger than hers, king-sized and long. While lounging next to him in it, their limbs curled together in a way she can’t remember having done before, she feels so small, like the buildings below as a plane gains altitude. Jean feels as if this moment is intended for just the two of them, as if it’s supposed to be secret from the world around them. No matter how she feels, this feeling is just for her, but the weighty warmth of Jakob’s body makes her correct the thought. This feeling is for both of them, or so she’s uncomfortable with hoping. **  
**

This time, they weren’t as obsessive. She communicated for once, and not in the standard way she needed to with woefully and obnoxiously inexperienced men. Somehow, she found the vulnerability addictive, how the press of his big hands against her hips promised more, how she hesitated before pushing him away afterward. Though she’s used to partners, she isn’t used to someone who strokes her hair absentmindedly, someone whose knee is flush with hers. It should feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t. Instead, there’s glimpses, like the setting sun beyond the patch of homemade stained glass above his headboard, like the look of her clothes on top of his rug. She hadn’t even worn decent underwear, had gone cotton and a flesh-toned brassiere and even a pantiliner that he would probably find stuck to his bed frame sometime in the next few months. Feeling the way he holds her, she thinks, _this has been going on for a long time now,_  but when she sees his tattoos up close, she thinks,  _this is the first time I’ve ever met this man._  She should feel claustrophobic, but she doesn’t. Instead, she wants to stay right here, as if the world won’t need her again until she’s ready to leave this room. She wants him to kiss her again in the intense and needy way he did while inside her, in the sloppy way he did afterward. She wants him to hold her hand.

“You have tattoos,” he says, breaking the silence between them. “I didn’t notice.”

For a moment, she’s stunned, out of her feeling mind and into her thinking one, but then, she holds up her wrists, offers, “Just little ones.”

He traces the pad of his index finger over the Sanskrit as if mapping stars in the sky.

“Fading,” he says. “Old. I know who can fix it.”

“No, no fixing,” she says, taking her wrist back slowly, looking down at the tattoo. “It’s old. I want it to be old.”

“What does it say?” he asks.

In truth, she can’t remember. Countless times, she’s thought about looking it up on the internet, and countless times, she’s preferred to let it remain a mystery. It’s something about inner peace, she thinks, or kindness to all living beings. Back then, she’d gotten it as a personal daily mantra; it seems so wrong but so horribly right that she’s forgotten it’s meaning.

“I can’t remember,” she says, huffing a little laugh.

He laughs too, body shaking beneath hers, and she feels herself wince with the emotion, wince in a good way; this part is overwhelming, how the physical parts all move in such human ways. She knows sex, but she doesn’t know this, whatever  _this_  is, though she still wants more of it nonetheless.

“And this one?” He traces the  _O_  on her other hand.

“For my son,” she says, immediately forthcoming this time, a little smile on her lips. “He doesn’t know that, though. I told him it was a sign of unity when he asked, but that was a lie.”

He furrows his brow.

“Why lie?” he asks.

And for a moment, she feels herself hesitate, wanting to keep the story to herself, but when she looks up to this man, to his warm face, to the smile he’s been wearing for her since the moment he first saw her, she knows she can tell him. He’ll keep her secret. He’ll cherish it, even. She’s never known someone who would cherish her secrets.

“After her was born,” she explains, “I...it wasn’t postpartum, I don’t think. Holding him didn’t feel close enough. I felt so strangely alone. And in the last trimester, you want your body back, you want that autonomy, but I missed him so much. I missed being able to feel when he moved. I missed how sacred that relationship was. We had been a part of each other, but that partnership felt broken. The one time I left him alone with his father was to go out and have this done. I wanted him to be a part of me again.”

In the silence afterwards, she feels her heart bound, the vulnerability making her cheeks feel hot. Uncomfortably, she gives, “That must sound so-“

But he interrupts her by taking her hand in his and bringing her fingertips to a tattoo over his left ribs.

“My first daughter,” he says, “when she was two.”

A child’s handwriting is tattooed there, an  _I love my Pappa_ intermingling with pieces of artwork. When he goes to move her hand away, she holds back, still looking at the letters. She wants to look at them a moment more.

When she loosens her grip, he takes her hand to the next spot, this one more toward his right hip. _Running out of space,_  she thinks as he points her to a drawn sun with swirls for beams, a child’s drawing.

“My second,” he says.

Flattening her palm against his chest, she traces the outline of the sun with her thumb, her fingertip mapping this small part of this man. There are so many more tattoos. He’s bound to have one for his wife, but she’s not ready to ask about it, and she doubts he’s ready to tell her. But if she thinks about the weight of it all, about how much humanity they each contain, she’ll get anxious. She’ll think of futures that won’t happen and responsibilities she doesn’t have and loyalties she doesn’t owe to anyone. Instead, she forces her mind shut. For now, she just wants to be with this man. She wants each of these touches to mean something. For once, she can’t figure a man out after one night. It’s not even night yet, the sun still setting and casting strange light into this new bedroom. For once, she wants to stay until morning.

Bringing a hand to her cheek, he makes her look up at him, then pulls her closer to him with his other arm and kisses her like she wanted him to, like it doesn’t matter whether or not every kiss is earth-shattering, like he can’t  _not_  kiss her right now.

“You are a fascinating woman,” he says, their faces close.

She rests her palm over a tattoo of his that she knows nothing about and kisses him with fervor.


	5. choking

anonymous asked:

Jean and Jake have a romantic dinner on the porch but then Jean accidentally chokes on food and Jakob has to do the Heimlich maneuver on her and they snuggle after

_this is wild from the “jean and jake” to the “heimlich” to the “snuggle” this is the greatest prompt i have ever received_

He handmade boards specifically for tonight, chopping and sanding wood, the olive color matching other bowls in his kitchen. Someday, he wants to migrate his things to her cabinets, her beeswax mugs next to his salt-rock cutting board, her French press pouring coffee into his favorite mixing bowl as he blends together decadent chocolate cake batter. He wants his practical knives alongside her colorful ones, his wire whisk next to her deformed plastic, her chipped and mismatched plates next to his wife’s good china. Sometimes, when the sink is full of the results of breakfast baking and cups of tea on the porch, it feels as if he truly belongs here. He washes the dishes, of course; he doesn’t trust her around sinks anymore.

Strangely enough, she already had chopsticks in her drawers. Though the knives in her drawers were all dull - he sharpens them when he comes over, with her leaning against the kitchen counter and watching with curled toes - she somehow had chopsticks, and not the disposable kind. When he plates the nigiri, he can hear her beyond the open glass doors turning the page of her book, something for fun, nothing about sex or therapy or any of the other topics that he forbids be mentioned in dinnertime conversation. _I do not talk about bathrooms,_  he said,  _so you do not talk about sex._ Over time, he’s watched her activity while he cooks shift; at first, she would nag him as if she could help - she can’t, she burns everything, after an incident with a marshmallow he no longer trusts her with even the microwave - and then, she would shift toward patient notes, writeups, anything work-related to get done in the last hours of daylight. But he doesn’t want her working at a time like this, right before eating, in the evening after most have commuted home; he wants her doing something comfortable, hedonistic, normal. So, she reads a novel on the porch, the flick of her pages keeping time for him. One flick: he puts down the last of the nigiri. Another flick: he plates the California roll, the spicy eel, the smoked salmon. She turns the page: he pulls pickled ginger from a jar, squeezes real wasabi - not the horseradish alternative, the real thing - from a tube. As he carries the two boards out to the porch, she’s just finished her chapter, and she looks up at him in that silent, serene way of hers, glad just to be right here, glad that the day’s only a bit cloudy, glad that he’s made her dinner. 

With her dinner in front of her on the table, she reaches out before he can set his own board down, tugs on his shirt so that he’ll lean down for a kiss. She’s affectionate, his Jean. He never expected her to be so affectionate. 

“I haven’t had sushi in the longest time,” she says, a little smile on her lips as she picks up her chopsticks, as he sits down. “Otis doesn’t like it, and I hate ordering takeaway that we can’t share.”

When they all order takeaway, five people total in Jean’s living room, it’s Thai or Indian, and half of it is vegetarian for his girls. Lamb saag for Jean and Jakob, chicken makhani for them both and Otis too, lots and lots of daal and chana masala shared, extra rice and naan because they love leftovers. And they’ll pile onto the couch and watch something, the decision split down some near-arbitrary plane: Jean likes romance, Ola thinks most comedy nowadays is idiotic, his second daughter can’t stand historical fiction even though Jean loves it, Otis will watch anything other than documentaries which poses a problem because Ola tends to favor nonfiction. The debate between subtitles or no subtitles is endless. And, of course, there’s the dishware conundrum: is it wrong to go straight from the container if they’re all family, or should they dirty dishes? And they’ll sit together on the couch and pick out of each other’s boxes, saying that this movie isn’t funny or that whoever picked the show tonight has horrible taste and please pass the panang shrimp. It wouldn’t feel right if they couldn’t share.

“It’s embarrassing,” she says, chopsticks hovering above a salmon roll. “I have such a small mouth. I have to eat it in two bites.”

And he smiles warmly at her, his little woman with her little quirks, how she critiques the way he holds a can of whipped cream over her breasts in bed, telling him that the container is supposed to be straight up-and-down and not at an angle. She can’t eat sushi in one bite, but she can force them to switch places, straddling his hips as he leans back on her pillow, demonstrating with a straight up-and-down can over his nipple and then wrapping her lips around the end result. 

“Would you like a knife?” he asks.

“No, no,” she says quickly, sawing a chopstick through one piece of nigiri. “I’ll manage.”

And, all things considered, he did a good job for having never made sushi before; the rice is sticky and flavorful, the fish fresh, the wasabi spicy. He watches how she pinches a piece of the wasabi on top of each roll, then dips the roll into a little cup of soy sauce and bites off as much as she can chew. In between bites, she tells him that the movie theater in town is screening  _When Harry Met Sally_ this weekend, would he like to go? And he doesn’t remember when it started being like this, but they ask each other to places without such things being meant as dates. No, it’s just normal. Would you like to go to a movie with me this weekend? Yes, I would. What if we get dinner beforehand, at that new place down the street. I would love that; let me make a reservation. And afterward? Do you mind if I stay over? Of course I don’t mind, I want you to, but I have work to do this weekend, so I’ll have to attend to that at some point. I’ll stick around if you don’t mind, do your laundry, wash your dishes. Would you mind fixing the sink in the upstairs bathroom? It shakes whenever it comes on. No, I wouldn’t mind at all.

He’s pulled from the thought when she stops talking, words almost caught in her throat, and when he looks up at her, he can tell that she’s choking, the way she can’t seem to take air in, the frightened look she gives him when their eyes meet. And she uses the universal sign, hands around her neck, but he’s already up, lifting her from her seat and wrapping his arms around her from behind, fist toward the diaphragm, five pulses. By the third, she’s coughing, salmon and rice stickily smearing over her novel’s cover, her coughs letting him finally exhale. He hadn’t even needed to do back-blows, thankfully. He knows how sore her spine can get. 

Sitting down, she tries to catch her breath, and he kneels alongside her, palm at her shoulder, asking silently for what she needs. 

“Shit,” she manages, taking a deep breath. “Took me by surprise.” 

He nods quickly, trying to force his own heart rate to slow. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, flushing with embarrassment, “I didn’t mean-”

“No, no,” he gives, palm against her back, rubbing gently. “Two bites, not one.”

Next time, he’ll make sure she has a knife. 


	6. hard day

_[enigmaticdr](https://enigmaticdr.tumblr.com/) asked:_

_jean has a hard session with a client who has been cheated on by their partner and jean tries to push down how it makes her feel but jakob knows she's had a hard day and comforts her_

She explained it to him once, right after a long workday led them to fight about absolutely nothing: psychologically speaking, it tends to be little piled-up grievances that push people over the edge rather than large, singular ones. So, he doesn’t think she’s actually angry about all the dishes in the sink tonight. She’s not actually annoyed that he didn’t get to them yet. Still, he can feel her rage as he checks on the lasagna in the oven, seeing how crisp the edges have grown. In her defense, he did use the pasta press, a lot of floured counterspace, and multiple bowls and cutting boards, so the pile is certainly a pile, but usually, she loves when he cooks. She loves when he makes something hearty and delectable for dinner, when he makes her rare and buttery steak or a big spicy pot of soup with sausage paired with rosemary bread he baked himself, so however she’s feeling now, he doubts that it’s his fault.

Still, she’s feeling it, and he can sense her anger. Though he could ask what’s wrong, he knows he’ll get a customary  _nothing,_  that she’ll come around when she wants to. For now, he takes the lasagna out of the oven to set, then finds a good bottle of wine, asks her if she would like a glass.

“Fine,” she says, rubbing a ceramic plate practically raw with her sponge. 

He pours her a glass, aerates the wine before setting the glass on the counter alongside her, a neutral offering. As he would expect given her mood, she doesn’t thank him and instead reaches for the glass and takes a long sip while the sink is still on, her hands bright red from the heat of the water. By the time he’s grated enough parmesan for the two of them - they both like it in heaps on pasta, pizza too - she’s already done with her glass, and he knows based on her size and how giggly she can get that she’s a little buzzed right now, but still, all she seems is upset, the anger transforming as she runs out of dishes to wash. As they sit down at the table on the porch, the sun just starting to set beyond the house, she has her brow furrowed in an almost pained way, as if relaxing her face at all would make her cry. 

“So,” he says, bringing his fork through the lasagna. He did a good job with the ricotta, but his noodles are still a little too dense.  _You always say stuff like that, but I never notice any of what you mention,_  she always says when he critiques his own work, and maybe that’s the best part of it all, how he could fuck up plenty of times and still please her. “How was work?”

And she closes her eyes instinctively, and he knows he’s asked the wrong question. Still, she lets out a breath, pieces apart her food, says, “Fine.”

“Anything interesting?”

She huffs, says, “Woman who was cheated on. Repeatedly.”

Oh.  _Oh._

“And now,” Jean continued, eyes focused on her fork, trying to seem aloof, “she feels as if she can’t connect with anyone because she can’t move past the hurt.”

He goes to interject, to change the subject, but she continues, saying, “He gave her things too, and she learned that way. He never even came clean. She’s not even sure how many women it was, but she’s found seven so far. I told her to stop looking, but…”

When she doesn’t finish the sentence, he can see tears forming in her eyes, but she’s not going to cry, not now, she’s just going to have her dinner and not notice that his noodles are gummier than would be ideal, and maybe, in the dark in bed, she’ll bring up the topic again, speak in her darker, lower voice for more serious matters, and she’ll tell him exactly what she felt, what she still feels. He knows how much this frustrates her, how it creeps up on her, how it’s never really going to go away, but he’s never going to hurt her like that, absolutely never. Though he can’t do much, he can at least be a decent man. It feels like next to nothing, but he forces himself to think it’s something.

She shakes off the topic and says that the ricotta is really good and makes some other benign comment that he only halfway answers, his sentence complete but his mind on other things. When she goes for second helpings, he plates it for her, some for himself too, and though dinner is fine, perfectly fine, he can still see in her face how much today has hurt. And, to some degree, he feels it to, not as acutely or fiercely but still in a certain kind of way; he feels for the pain she experienced, for how such an idiotic man could let her go in a horrific way, for how someone couldn’t see just how valuable she is. He loves her,  _loves_  her, and there’s so much of her to love, the little ways she surprises him every day, how much more physically affectionate she’s grown, how it took her time to open up about her feelings but how she does so so easily now.  _You treat me too well,_  she once told him while he made them charcuterie to take on a picnic in a local park, the two of them putting out and blanket and sunning for the afternoon, her head on his stomach as they sprawled out and read together, but the truth was that nothing he could do would outweigh what she does for him, opening her home to him, opening her family, loving him so completely despite it all. It hurts to know that someone dismissed her as worth losing. If he ever encounters her ex-husband, he doesn’t trust himself not to punch the man square in the jaw. 

Back in the kitchen, she reaches out to take his dish, to wash them both, but he shakes his head, says, “No more dishes for you.” 

So she nods, lets him take the dishes to wash, covers the lasagna in foil and puts it into the fridge, but standing there while he washes silverware, she seems agitated even when he’s not looking at her, and by the time the dishes are on the rack to dry, he looks over to see that she has stubborn tears on her cheeks, tears she was trying to keep from expressing. He sighs in her pain, reaching for her, pulling her into his arms, wrapping her up, and for once, even though she’s upset, even though she usually gets distant when she’s upset, she comes to him with ease, cries deepening as she hides her face in his shirt, finally having the release he knows she’s been needing since that client’s appointment. 

“Man was an idiot,” he consoles her, pulling her close and rubbing at her back. “Yes, idiot.”

She nods against him, but he knows she doesn’t quite believe him. 

“It still hurts,” she tells him, her words quiet and muffled. “I hate that it still hurts so much.”

“I know, I know,” he consoles, not knowing what else to say. Some pain doesn’t go away; some of it has to be felt over and over again in a monotonous, horrible way, and someday, it may dissipate, but the real way to live is to act as though the pain is just something to carry in everyday life, just a part of yourself, something like your eye color or hair. Then, it doesn’t matter if anyone ever overcomes. Some pain, he knows, is to be let in, not shooed out. If she cries over this every day for a week, he understands why and respects her for it.

“Never again,” he whispers to her, and she lets out a deep breath against him, nods against him.

“Never again,” she agrees, and thankfully, she knows it’s true.


	7. coffee

anonymous asked:

jean and jakob go on a coffee date (jean probably gets something ridiculously specific)

_THANK YOU FOR THIS omg_

_ugh okay so like lowkey i have a history with this the first msr fic i ever posted which was BAD was this exact plot and mulder got a frapuccino ugh 2016 sam i know you were extremely sick but didn’t you have DIGNITY????_

It was her idea - yes,  _her idea,_ he has to keep reminding himself - to take things slowly at first. Though the day at his home that wasn’t supposed to be memorable meant that he now knows - and can recount in her sleepy voice, her mouth warm against his bare skin, the way she sounded telling him her secrets as if they were seeping from her lips, her reluctance still present but growing smaller as she spoke, her cheeks uncomfortably warm as she told him how it felt when her ex-husband cheated on her the first time, and the second time, and the time after that, and then the time after that - plenty of her history, she still thought that it would be better this way, that a genuine chance to get to know each other would be proper, that some semblance of normalcy would make things easier. It’s so clear that neither of them has really  _been_  with someone in a long time, from the way they stumble around each other to how they can’t take each other’s cues to how he feels as if he’s taking up either too much space around her or too little; they’re accustomed to being alone, to having families but not partners, to filling up spaces left in another’s absence, to make a life that shows that there was never any absence to begin with. 

But he wants there to be room for her in his life, so he forced Ola to teach him how to use the Uber app - he isn’t very good at it just yet, but he thinks he’ll figure it out eventually, and anyway, he managed to get himself here, and that’s all that really matters in the end - and asked both of his daughters which of two shirts he should wear because he felt nervous and couldn’t decide. And his younger girl had said  _Dad, it’s just coffee,_  as if he should know what that means.  _Just coffee?_ And to them, maybe it is just coffee, but he knew that this woman had a tattoo on her hip that couldn’t be seen under clothes, that one of her clearest memories from her son’s birth was that she didn’t want her husband to watch, that she was allergic to bees and hated calla lilies and was the worst member of her book club because she always forgot when the meetings were and could never remember which book they were on. And beyond all of that, he didn’t think there could be  _just anything_ with Jean, that he would find her in a pair of wide-legged pants and a funky blouse at this coffee shop and feel under-dressed in comparison, that she would ask him if he wanted to split a sticky bun and then tell a long, lavish story of when she was studying abroad in France - she speaks French so poorly that he wonders how she ever got around during that time in her life, let alone passed her classes - and how she would pick up a sticky bun from the same patisserie every morning - and sometimes in the evenings too, because she’s always had a sweet tooth - and he would nod along as she explained how they were  _so_ sweet, and with hand-ground cinnamon, which is  _so_  much better, and he’ll think, ground cinnamon. I need to grind cinnamon for her. No, I need to teach her about the different kinds of cinnamon, and then, I need to make her sticky buns, and the list will go on and on, and he’ll find himself reeling, and then she’ll ask,  _Are you listening?_  And his honest answer as he brings himself back to their table, back to the woman ahead of him, his mind still reeling from it all, will be, _No, I’m sorry. I’m not._

Still, he’s alone when he walks into the cafe she recommended, somewhere small and cozy, purple velvet curtains pulled back with golden metal whorls, overstuffed couches and stone-mosaic tables lining the wooden walls, the whole place smelling like perfectly-roasted beans. There aren’t many other people here, so it doesn’t take him long to see that she’s not here yet, but then again, he can almost sense it in the air: if she were here right now, he would feel it from the way she breathes, the way she says  _um_ to herself, the way she brushes her hair back or folds her glasses up with that little  _click._

He looks up at the menu, thinks that a flat white would be good but isn’t quite sure, hasn’t had the coffee here before, doesn’t know how the roast will be. Full fat is always best, but what if he wants to taste more of the coffee itself, less of the milk? Is an espresso doppio proper for a date? What if she orders a nice, big cup of something, maybe even tea, something that takes a long time to cool, and he has his two little espresso shots, finished in a few seconds, and just sits there as if waiting for her to finish? Inside the pastry cases, there are - he swallows hard - sticky buns, and something called  _morning buns_  that he’s never heard of, and muffins and cookies and loaf cake and danishes with cheese in the center. And then there’s-

When he hears the door to the shop open, he feels the air change and knows she’s here, knows the sound of her little clogs half-rushing, half-wandering to the counter, can sense that she’s wearing something silky.  _We’re taking it slowly,_  he reminds himself though he’d much rather hold the door open for her as she walks into his home, then sit with her on the couch while there are sticky buns in the oven, alternating between talking about life and pushing each other back down onto the couch cushions, panting with the effort, laughing in between. Her left hip has been numb in one area since the birth of her son; she asked him to be gentle with it. Of all things, she asked him to be gentle with her left hip, just that one, because she can’t feel it anymore.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says as she meets him at the counter, as an uninterested barista waits nonetheless to take their order. 

He watches as she quickly scans each line of the menu, squinting from behind her glasses, confirming her order at lightning speed. 

“Could we get, um,” she squints harder, “a double shot latte with coconut milk, and could you do just a little bit of caramel sauce on top? Not that much, just a little, in a swirl maybe? And a slice of lemon pound cake to go, two slices actually, and two sticky buns, but only wrap one of those to go, and a blueberry muffin, just one, to go. So all of that wrapped except for one of the sticky buns.”

She turns toward him, looks up at him. She’s wearing a wrap dress with a skirt just past the knee, a long cardigan with the sleeves bunched up about her elbows, two bangle bracelets on one of her wrists; he stares down at the tattoo of an  _o_ , at the Sanskrit on her wrist, at how her nails are painted a soft, pale pink. Even among all the scents of the coffee shop, she still smells like herself, like jasmine flowers and lavender castile soap, like some kind of hair pomade he’s seen when he takes the girls to the salon.

“What would you like?” she asks, and it takes him a moment to remember that he’s ordering coffee, that this is what  _taking things slowly_ is, that this is, despite everything else he’s feeling, completely normal.

He orders a cappuccino, and though he takes out his wallet in order to pay, she’s a quick, sneaky woman, and she’s done tap-to-pay before he can even slip his card out from its slot. So, that’s how he’ll end this date. He’ll say, _well, now I need to pay you back,_  and she’ll say  _oh, nonsense,_  and he’ll say,  _how about with dinner?_  And then she’ll smile in that girlish way that he can tell catches her off-guard because she looks just a little bit vulnerable afterward, brushing her hair out of her face and acting nervous, and she’ll say,  _yeah, okay,_  and they’ll go to a restaurant, and she’ll ask him to a museum after that, and then, only then, will he have the courage to say,  _let me make you dinner. Three courses._  And though he’ll never tell her, he hopes that he can make a fourth course the next morning, that he’ll wake up next to her, that he’ll make pancakes as she sits naked-except-for-his-shirt on top of the kitchen counter and swings her legs back and forth to the sound of his favorite radio station’s gospel music hour on Sunday mornings. 

She leads him over to a couch, setting down her various bags of baked goods and her one plated sticky bun atop the stone mosaic table, her caramel latte warming her palms. 

“So,” she says in between sips of her latte, “I was wondering what you would think of trying hands-free hypnosis.”

“Hands-free?” he questions.

“You know.” She stares down at him, then back up, and suddenly, he doesn’t want to take things slowly anymore.


	8. picnic

_[scintillatingbluefishies](https://scintillatingbluefishies.tumblr.com/) asked:_

_jean and jakob go to a field with lots of flowers and it’s sunny and warm and jakob picks a flower and puts it in her hair_

 

While arranging their first real date, he asked her over the phone what kind of restaurant she would like to go to, whether or not she liked dressing up, and she told him in a shrugging voice,  _I’m not exactly a romantic person._  Still, he brought her flowers, a bouquet of springish daffodils, yellow and bright and sunny as she looked down at them, and she blushed in a way that confirmed her statement, not knowing what to do with the bouquet, asking him with folded eyebrows if leaving the flowers in the backseat of her station-wagon would be a bad idea; the day was hot, and she didn’t want them to wilt, or so she had said, likely for his own benefit. He’d thought about bringing her tulips still in soil, the kind given as plantable Easter gifts, but that had seemed too forward, too much. As he took her into the restaurant, palm hovering over the small of her back because he didn’t know what permission he had, he glanced back at her car, at the leather seat where the flowers now sat, and wondered,  _Did she really not want them?_

But she owns a picnic basket lined with red gingham, the kind from storybooks, and she tucks romance novels underneath her uppity nonfictions on her bedside table, and sometimes, he catches her looking at websites for jewelry, the kind she would never buy for herself, something too plain and boring for her style that could be made special if only someone were to gift a piece to her. She keeps all of her son’s baby teeth in an enamel box with her jewelry - he found them by accident while fetching a pendant for her, her heels of the evening making walking back upstairs a challenge - and she cataloged all of his drawings in a binder kept in her office, each one dated and listing his age at the top, as if she were a historian of his life. And a few months in, she was on the porch with a glass of wine when she asked him if he would go inside and get her book so that she could read, and as he took the book from her bedside table, he found a heavy psychiatric reference book beneath it, too bulky for nighttime reading, an anomaly in the bedroom. He picked up the reference, leafed through a few pages, and to his surprise, tissue paper fell out and onto his lap; when he peeled back the layers, he found pressed daffodils, the same from their first date.  _She kept them,_  he thought, frozen in the moment, finding himself unable to breathe.  _She kept them._

She folds her legs underneath the long, whimsy skirt of her dress, the fabric a deep shade of blue like coastal seas, little straps making perpendicular lines with her collarbone; they’re at the top of a hill looking down, and there’s the river in the distance, the treeline, even a little glimpse toward her home. They’ve set up halfway in the shade, halfway in the sun, taking in the summer warmth but trying not to burn her pale skin, and she reaches into that picnic basket of hers, the fooling around done for now. For today, he made tea sandwiches, brought along lavender lemonade - one of her favorite indulgences - and dark-but-not-too-dark chocolate - one of her other favorite indulgences - for sweets, and though they abandoned the basket and blanket for the past hour, walking barefoot through this meadow and watching the clouds pass, being silly as he scooped her off of the ground and spun her around while she laughed, they’re content to sit down now, to relax into the serenity of having nowhere else to be. Jean unpacks the wrapped sandwiches, setting them on top of their picnic blanket as he sits down, and she looks the way she should look in the summer: warm, freckled, smiling to herself in a way she likely doesn’t realize she’s doing.  _In love,_  he ventures, but then again, she isn’t a romantic person, is she?

When he goes to pour lemonade from the carafe into two mason jars she brought, he sees the picked flowers at the corner of their picnic blanket, her way of apologizing to the meadow; she insisted that, wherever they set up, they had to pick all of the flowers first so that they wouldn’t die for no good reason. Before handing off a glass to her, he plucks one of the flowers from her little pile, moves toward her on the blanket.

“Is this smoked salmon?” she asks behind a mouthful of sandwich, and it is, smoked salmon with cucumbers and cream cheese. Once, maybe four or five dates in, she insisted that they get lunch together at a local place with the best lox bagels. In the back of his datebook for work, he kept notes of all of it: likes lox bagels, quesadillas, saag paneer, masamaun curry. Of course it’s smoked salmon.

“Yes,” he says, passing her a glass as she hums in pleasure.

And he won’t disrupt her meal, but he wants to tuck the flower behind her ear, so he does, trailing his thumb down her cheek afterward, feeling muscles contract as she starts to smile. But it’s not just a smile; no, she blushes afterward too, looks down like she did after he told her that she was a wonderful mother, like she did after he said she looked beautiful before they went out for dinner on their last weekend trip to Paris. He’s had these moments too, when he’s moved away from her in bed because he was too warm only for her to lean in closer to him, practically pushing him off of the bed, because she wanted to cuddle more. At first, she had always pushed him away, moved to an opposite side of the bed, asked him to get something in order to avoid him, but now, she won’t let him find his way back to his side of the bed, not anymore. He’ll have to say  _Jean, I’m sorry, it’s too warm_  and listen to her groan pitifully in response as if he’s taken a toy from a child.

And she looks beautiful, and the color of the flower shows that she’s bound to have sunburned her cheeks. He slipped aloe gel into the picnic basket this morning, just in case.


	9. health scare

anonymous asked:

Jeankob prompt: Jean and Jakob are snuggling in bed watching a movie and Jakob comes across a lump on the side of Jean's breast and gets all concerned and she makes an appointment but everything turns out fine

 

_(i have no clue what the mechanics of this exactly would be because like how on earth do you palpate your partner’s breast while also snuggling in bed like. Are you like Please lift your arm and let me touch these areas and they’re like Alright. but regardless of this. also i think my go-to for why jean and jakob are alone in the house is that their kids went camping and we’re just going to keep it that way because i don’t care what they’re up to quite frankly._ _also lowkey horrible reminder that i’m supposed to be studying to be a breast expert but instead i have a fucking iv pole in my bedroom but that’s just life i guess lmao)_

Though such offices seem to be associated with good things, a first ultrasound of a baby or a checkup when one’s child is just big enough to be left home with another adult, he looks out at the pair of other women in the waiting room, at the sterile magazines advertising weight loss that hardly anyone entering this office needs, at the models of intrauterine devices, and feels his hands start to shake.  _It’s just why we’re here,_  he tells himself, but when she checked in, he stood off to the side, unable to see the papers she signed but able to hear the  _if someone calls, are we allowed to let them know that you’re here_  question, and stared down a series of hung pamphlets on miscarriage, domestic abuse, stillbirth, and infant loss. He’d had to research on the internet what a first gynecological exam would feel like because his daughter was of age and didn’t have a mother to explain such things to her, and as he read through the tools, as he saw diagrams and explanations, he winced. And now, sitting alongside Jean in the waiting room, he feels that this isn’t a hopeful office but a hopeless one, a helpless one, a place for bad news alone, for when she is taken into the examination room, her nurse will ask if she feels safe at home, and though Jean will answer yes, there are still plenty of women who will answer no.

While Jean panicked, walking flustered to her office so that she could google search if this was a lymph node or not, she spouted off the truth: most cysts are found not during routine exams or monthly self-checks but during sexual intercourse by one’s partner. At any other time, about any other subject, he would’ve laughed, but as he followed her into the office, his mind raced with daily saline and heparin flushes, pulling the car over so that his wife could vomit on the side of the road, shaking a social worker’s hand and knowing that this person’s presence meant that there was no coming back.  _I can’t go through it again,_ he thought as Jean forced on her glasses, as she opened her laptop, _but if it’s true, then I can’t_ not  _go through it either._

She doesn’t pick up one of the disconcerting women’s magazines in the waiting room. She doesn’t look at her cell phone. The other two women in the room talk about an episode of a popular television show. A nurse opens the cursed off-limits door and says, _Jean?_  He doesn’t follow her in. 

With the start of summer, the kids were going out into the woods to camp, spending time in a big group and enjoying the warm weather, so he brought a duffel to her place and christened the porch - in the rain, no less - because they’d been meaning to. While he let cinnamon buns go for a second rise, she sat on the kitchen counter and pulled him closer and tugged her skirt up and bit her lip. He nearly burned their dinner because she kept sneaking up on him and grabbing; she nearly spilled her coffee the next morning because she insisted on sitting on his lap. And because they couldn’t maintain that pace, they curled up together on the second night, lit vanilla-scented candles and put in one of her many DVDs. Of all the parts of her he’s seen since she started letting him in more, since she began to jump at opportunities for him to stay multiple nights, he likes her loungewear the best, the big elephant-patterned pants and wide-legged yoga sweats that cinch at the ankle, the cashmere sweaters unfit for athletic activity but perfect for communicating an athletic vibe; she was snuggled up in grey leggings and one of his old flannels - hers now, he’s sure he’ll never get it back, and that’s probably best because the holes in the elbows look good on someone so much smaller than him - when she insisted that he join her on the couch, her little gentle  _come here_  beckoning him over. And because they had the house to themselves, because it was a Saturday night on a rainy summer day, because she’d seen this movie plenty of times before, she was on top of him, unbuttoning his buttons over her own chest one by one, pale pink nail polish, trimmed nails, no rings; though he knew she would want to push his shoulders down until his back was flush with the couch, direct how this would go, he saw an opportunity to take over and went for it, loomed over her and her bare chest but covered arms and shoulders, slipped a throw pillow beneath her head before bringing his lips to her neck.  _Let me take my time,_  he told her without speaking, then watched as goosebumps raised on her chest.

And then he felt something and stilled, and she laughed lightly and asked  _is everything alright,_  and he touched again, and she stopped laughing.

At least hospital waiting rooms have televisions. If he were to pick up a magazine, he would learn how to bake cakes for a child’s birthday party, then how to lose the weight put on from that cake through drinking celery juice and worshiping an Instagram deity. He’s not sure which makes him more uncomfortable: the advertised intrauterine device demonstrated through a too-lifelike pop-out model, or the fact that he knows exactly which kind of device Jean has implanted. Though the examination room isn’t his place, his hands shake with the anticipation of their answer, and he just can’t wait for her to come out and tell him. No, he needs to know _now_  because then he can do something about it. With his wife, it had been ovarian, not breast, but he made her homemade ginger tea, peeled the roots himself and brewed them over the course of four hours, and he can still remember the recipe. He knows how to draw on a realistic eyebrow using makeup. He may not be able to work at all this week, stuck in his home unable to face the world, but he’ll be able to carry her to bed if she needs him to. He’s already done so before.

When she returns, when she leads him to the checkout, her expression hasn’t changed; they’ve sent out a biopsy and done bloodwork, but the mammogram wasn’t extremely suspicious. They need to wait a bit longer. Tonight, he had planned on taking her out to a nice dinner, but when they climb into her car, when she hesitates before turning the key in the ignition, he knows that he needs to care for her today, tonight, for as long as he can. They’ll have cinnamon buns for lunch, and they’ll watch movies that make her laugh while she snuggles up to him on the couch, and he’ll push her glasses up the bridge of her nose when they fall down. Reaching out, he takes her stilled hand in both of his, folds her fingers into a fist around her car keys, brings her knuckles to his lips; she closes her eyes, tilts her chin down, furrows her brow; he brushes his thumbs over her wrist and lets go for now.  _I’m here,_  he doesn’t say, and she starts the car, sighs as the engine comes on. When she can’t sleep tonight, he’ll make her tea. He’s only recently learned how she prefers to be consoled when she cries. He’ll wait for the result with her because he needs to. 

And even once they’ve learned that the cyst is benign, they don’t regret staying up until the small hours of the morning, their thoughts racing, tears stinging their eyes because of what this could mean; they don’t regret staying on the couch for the rest of the weekend, having food delivered to her doorstep, wearing the same clothes for a few days in the row, no sex.  _I’ll support you through this,_  he doesn’t regret telling her, and  _I know,_  she doesn’t regret saying back.


End file.
